It has been a while since questions about the form and meaning of “national” South African art on the international stage and the politics of South African representation have been of acute mainstream public interest with as much fervour as they have been this last week, when Gayton McKenzie, the minister of sport, arts and culture, terminated the department’s contract with Art Periodic to stage South Africa’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
South Africa’s art world, used to a consistent participation at the Venice Biennale since South Africa secured a semi-permanent 20-year lease in Venice in 2013, is reeling after this move from left field.
The Venice Biennale is a historic international art festival, often colloquially called the Olympics of Art, because countries participate at a national level. Or, as is now apparent, are prohibited from participating at a national level. This means that some countries own, manage and occupy whole buildings, like mini museums, in which elaborate, usually immersive exhibitions are staged, reflecting something significant of their local art worlds.
Other countries, like South Africa, do not have an entire building, but make use of large gallery-type spaces to present reflections from their art worlds. This is organised via official governmental channels for all participating countries (usually around 90 countries for the art festival). That means that there is no national pavilion without official state confirmation.
For South Africa, which has participated from 1950 to 1968, in 1993, 1995, and from 2011 onwards, who gets to decide what is meant by a “national representation” of the country’s art has varied over the years, and has always been hotly contested.
Pre-democracy, South Africa’s art participation at the Venice Biennale (as well as most of its international exhibition opportunities) was controlled by the South African Association of Arts (SAAA — later reconfigured and renamed as the still extant South African National Association for Visual Arts). It was opaque, but, for the most part, art-community-centric. The commissioner of the pavilion (ie, the head of the Selection Committee and liaison between South Africa and Venice) was usually a respected curator, art historian, museum director, art educator or (rarely), artist (as with Cecil Skotnes in the 1960s).
For two decades, the association decided, internally, who would represent South Africa in Venice, which artworks it would send, and how the artworks would be exhibited and catalogued, with little to no input or support from the government.
In fact, since 1950, the SAAA had to plead with the government to apply for and accept invitations to the biennale. South Africa’s pavilions remained unfunded until the tail end of its first decade of participation, and, after that, they were only ever very poorly and very reluctantly supported.
As the century progressed, what used to be an invigorating young arts association, a foil to a previous generation of stodgy, anti-modern artists, slowly turned into a stodgy, static, older arts institution that had to, essentially, become an agent of the apartheid state to maintain its position as “the face of South African arts abroad” (aka the gatekeepers of mainstream international opportunity for South African artists from 1948 to the early 1990s).
Transparent selection process
However, the association was challenged as South Africa’s art world grew acutely political, and in the 1990s, after years of exclusion due to anti-apartheid sanctions, an almost unrecognisable SAAA organised South Africa’s national pavilions with a deliberately transparent selection process, and, for the first time, with people of colour on the advisory boards (the first time artists of colour were represented at the South African national pavilion was in 1964 with Peter Clarke and Amos Langdown).
After an extremely controversial return in 2011, the selection procedure was organised into its current iteration: a standard-procedure national tender application. That is, the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture (DSAC) puts out a public call for proposals, and a rotating Bid Evaluation Committee awards the bid to an arts/events company, usually with little time to prepare.
When South Africa returned to the Venice Biennale in the 2000s, a major shift was evident: in the past, the pavilion was organised with the (white) art world at the helm; in the new century the government finally took ownership of the pavilion, finally awarded the required funds and finally prioritised demographic representation, but commissioners turned from arts professionals to ambassadors and bureaucrats, and some efficiency and familiarity with the art world was sacrificed for due democratic process.
Throughout all of this, there has never been a consensus about what constituted representative South African art. Public polemic about the selections used to proliferate even mainstream media beyond the art world. And ever since the DSAC (inclusive of its past iterations) took ownership, it has consistently failed to grasp the nature of the Venice Biennale, which can be overtly esoteric and academic.
Forewords by ambassadors and ministers have always expressed diplomatic desires for the pavilions to foster nation-building aims, even referencing South Africa’s alignment with BRICS and its hosting of the Fifa World Cup at the same time as curators and artists were publishing essays expressing the complex politics of South African or African identity (as in the 2011 catalogue).
Imbalance of perception
The imbalance of perception of the national pavilion’s “job” in Venice and how it “works” — that is, its politics — between governmental and arts authorities has been painfully evident.
But never has the South African government apparatus pulled the rug out from the country’s art community quite like this. Even when the South African pavilion had little to say about the specifics of South Africanness (as with the 2017 pavilion); even when the post-apartheid pavilions have been sharply critical of the very government funding their pavilion (as with the 2015 pavilion); even when the pavilions presented horrors distinctly familiar to South Africa and South Africans (though in esoteric language, crafted by arts insiders), not remotely encouraging a positivist foreign-policy view.
Or, rather, it should be said, “Never at the Venice Biennale.” McKenzie’s scrub of artist Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy draws an unfortunate parallel with the apartheid government’s censoring actions at the height of South Africa’s era of art and cultural sanctions.
Read more: Goodman Gallery drops artist Gabrielle Goliath after her Venice Biennale selection
While South Africa was cold-shouldered by Venice between 1968 and 1993, the art biennials in South America were important platforms for the South African art world. Some argued that the apartheid government funded these exhibitions — even sending work by black artists; even when such work referred to the atrocities of the apartheid government (eg, Ezrom Legae’s Freedom is Dead drawings received a special award at the Valparaiso Bienal in 1979) — as a smoke screen of tolerance.
Whether tolerance or ignorance, this funding for South African art in Chile was pulled in 1981 when drawings from Paul Stopforth’s Biko series were selected for Valparaiso. The government cancelled the South African entry, noting it could not be expected to support work of such a divisive nature. This is what state interference in cultural representation looks like — we have seen it before.
False comparison
Much has been published about McKenzie’s false comparison between the genocide in Gaza and the unfounded claims of genocide in South Africa. Something has been said of his Trumpian response (he is only acting as a “patriot”) and his wish for the South African pavilion to showcase art that highlights the South African experience specifically.
In general, this cancellation and the DSAC’s official response ask the big questions that have been looming like shifting shadows: What does it mean for a country like South Africa, with all its politics of representation, to have a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale? What is representative South African art (if something like this can be said to exist at all)? Who is the national pavilion for? What is at stake in mounting a national pavilion at the so-called Olympics of Art?
It is unfortunate that this political cancellation comes at a time when South Africa finally managed to organise a pavilion featuring a striking work by a single artist (South Africa, being burdened by the politics of representation, has only once before mounted a pavilion by a single artist: Malcolm Payne’s Walls of Venice in 1995), and where this work addresses violence against women and children — precisely the kind of subject that is urgent to South Africans and legible in a global sense.
It is also unfortunate to receive this blow for the 2026 Venice Biennale, which, having been organised by the late Koyo Kouoh, is likely to see a surge in international interest in African art. To withdraw now is to squander continuity and credibility in an arena where both matter. DM
Annchen Bronkowski is a creative knowledge resources postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cape Town and author of A History of South Africa at the Venice Biennale: The politics of looking South African.